Thoughts and updates from the great frontier of life.

Signs of the Apocalypse – Early Christmas edition

So, last year I posted the Christmas Noah’s Ark and called it the abomination that it truly is. But Americans are creative and industrious people. So this year I present the Santa at the Manger figurine.

So here’s the thing. I originally was going to post this simply because I thought it was a wonderfully atrocious new creation of American kitschy-ness. But then I did a little google search for “Santa+manger” and found that, no, this was not the first time this has been created. In fact, Santa at the manger figurines are all over the place and have been for years. There’s even www.santaatthemanger.com which seems to be the main site for a childrens book.

There’s a whole host of reasons this kind of stuff bothers me.

On some level it’s just asking for basic critical thinking to be applied to it. Such as when your kid inevitably asks you why you believe one of these characters is real and the other is imaginary but yet you still put them in the same plaster scene together.

Perhaps it’s more selfish than that. I kind of like my religious things to stay religious and my secular things to stay secular. Yeah, I know it’s compartmentalization, but it’s just easier that way.

Oh, and for the record, it’s the beginning of October, Christmas shouldn’t be here yet. If I were going to lobby congress for anything, one of the highest on the list would be to outlaw Christmas stuff in stores before thanksgiving. It’s just plain wrong, I TELL YA!

you know, I agree about Christmas creep-lets leave Christmas for Advent (or at least November)

but I confess there’s something kind of cute about Santa and Jesus, in that classic trashy Americana kind of way.

Thinking symbolically, our superficial commercial Christmas junk really should be subservient to the celebration of Jesus. Putting Santa in the manger highlights the ways in which we’ve turned Christmas into a secular holiday, with a patron saint of consumption. I don’t want my sacred and secular seperated all the time, because it is in the seperation of sacred and secular that the pernicious influence of culture can be most destructive, since we’re not paying attention to compare the secular with our religious values.

In terms of real/imaginary, I think its always good to talk about our myths with our children, and about what stories mean, and why we tell them. I mean, its not like kids don’t engage the intersection of reality and imaginary all the time, its a core component of all children’s television.

Katie and I often drive around at Christmas time and honk our car horn every time we see a plastic baby Jesus. I’m not sure why, but it just seems to be an appropriate response for our Lord and Savior cast in plastic.

Alan’s Blog

Just so you know who I actually am, my name is Alan Stucky and I'm a thinker, feeler, photographer, lover, man of faith, doubter, passionate, pastor, apathetic, ex-football player, tech-nerd, and a whole host of other things. It'll all probably come up at some point.